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PLAYing outside the box - Teens

by Erin Reilly on Nov 27, 2011

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This presentation introduces Project New Media Literacies’ skills-oriented after-school program in digital citizenship, piloted with high school students at Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Spr...

This presentation introduces Project New Media Literacies’ skills-oriented after-school program in digital citizenship, piloted with high school students at Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools in Spring 2011. Drawing on frameworks from New Media Literacies, Social & Emotional Learning, the Ethics Casebook, and Mapping in a Participatory Culture, this program uses hands-on activities (e.g., mapping communities, discussing ethics, harnessing multimedia) to facilitate participants’ development of the skills required for citizenship, both online and offline.

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Jean Piaget captures this sense of the value of play when he tells us that "play is the work of childhood." He rejects any simple opposition between play and work, suggesting that play is the most important work children perform, because it is through play they acquire basic knowledge and skills fundamental to their culture. A kitten plays at stalking. In a hunting society, children play with bows and arrows. And in an information society, people play with information and interfaces.
We can rehearse and acquire core skills and knowledge through play because play lowers the stakes of failure. One of the activities we've developed through Project NML for thinking about play is called "Fail and Fail Often," and it uses the casual game, Bloons, to get people to reflect on the strategies of experimentation and calibration they apply in solving problems in games. This is a totally addictive game in part because it is so simple and the way you move forward through the game is to try different strategies, most of which will not work. Through this process, we learn basic things about the physics of the game and how different materials respond to us. We can compare this with the role failure plays in schools: children are afraid to fail and teachers are afraid to tell their students that they are failing. As a result, students do not take risks which might push their performance forward and they do not get the feedback they might need to better calibrate their efforts.
Because of the importance we place on play, we call the professional development program we’re developing PLAY (which is an acronym for Participatory Learning and YOU!) Our goal is to bring the value of play as a guiding principle in the educational process, one that is too often shut out in our focus on teaching to the test.
What does participatory learning look like in practice? We have conducting an after school program which we launched at the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools this semester, a program focused around themes of digital citizenship. The RFK schools (six altogether, each with different focuses and philosophies) launched this fall and they are still trying to work through their identity and norms as a community.
We sought ways to get students focused on the process of defining who they were as a community through play and creative activities. Johnny: “Play is imagination in reality.” “Creativity is imagination as a tool.” “Creativity is the refugefrom reality.” (February 10, 2011)Kashfe says that he likes the World Wall because it involves:“Providing your own interpretation. Instead of looking at them in thedictionary. You dont learn like that”
One activity had the students taking photographs of "invisible borders or boundaries" which shaped their social interactions, whether borders based on gender, class, or the line between student and teacher or the line between the different schools using the shared facility. This focus on norms of inclusion or exclusion was enhanced by the challenge of using photography, normally a medium for capturing the visible, as a means of representing things which are understood but often not explicit, often not seen or observed.
Another activity, developed by Stefani Relles sought to get students to construct an anthem for their school, using very open ended modes of visual orchestration, and then, using simple instruments, trying to produce meaningful noise together. The goal was not only to get students to articulate what their schools meant to them but also to experience music-making as a creative process, one which was structured to free them from anxieties about performance.AnthemVisualization of what the words mean, or how you would play them "That there is no good or bad music or playing...". Johny adds "We learnt that music is politic" like the American anthem…. "And that there is unconsciousness in music"
In our research, we’ve identified five "characteristics” as central to creating successful participatory learning environments. The list emerged as a result of our experience running a pilot professional development program with a group of early adopters last year. Based on the varied ways the PD succeeded and failed, the final question we were left with was probably the first one we should have asked: "What are the ingredients of a participatory culture of learning, And what are the practices that help build and sustain it?" Since then, this is the question our research group has set out to answer.In thinking about the characteristics, we believe Motivation and new forms of engagement foster meaningful play and experimentation. I’m sure we’ve all seen the determined and thoughtful face of a child playing a game. Games can be challenging and hard work. Take for example, In Lego’s minotoraus game -- here there is no board and there are no rules. Players are asked to build and create them together. When we conducted a workshop on these 5 characteristics with educators, the small group providing feedback on the characteristic, motivation and engagement, questioned whether any pre-fabricated lesson could effectively foster them. In their view, a contextualized learning goal and array of helpful tools is all that a facilitator should bring to the table; the rest -- how to achieve that goal, with what, and for what purpose -- should be determined by the learner.In classrooms where students are learning through open-ended play - increased motivation and engagement can result while still achieving the learning goal.
Currently, educators make distinctions between “formal” and “informal” learning. Lying outside these boundaries are the spontaneous, interest-driven activities young people pursue during their free time. These activities are fueled by a passion and an excitement that any teacher would love to see in the classroom. Young people learn negotiation skills as they move between communities with differing social norms. Students’ interest-driven practices can illuminate and inform what is taught in both formal and informal contexts, and classroom content can help learners apply new knowledge to their own interest-driven experiences. We call this exchange co-configured practices where educators and students pool their skills and knowledge and share in the tasks of teaching and learning. It very much uses the NMLs collective intelligence and networking and shifts the ownership and responsibility of learning to the student. This in turn, fosters equality in the learning space where knowledge is shared rather than doled out, a push - pull model rather than a model of consumption.
And this encourages learning that feels relevant to students’ identities and interests because in a participatory environment, students passions and interests can come forward and be part of the conversation. And the projects created and shared are not engaged only within the bounded space of a classroom only for a grade, but instead foster collaboration on knowledge-building and problem-solving activities, and social connections within vast array of friendship-driven and interest-driven networks (Ito, 2009)
An example of this is collaborating on a Wikipedia project rather than replicating the idea of one through pbwiki, or some other wiki software. Using the alternative pbwiki is what might be termed a “walled garden” approach, allowing students to tinker with wiki software and yet not be exposed to the potentially disruptive larger internet. However, choosing a walled garden approach also has many costs. Students who already use the internet know very well what is actually “out there,” and the walled garden runs the risk of losing their interest - because, after all, a walled garden isn’t the “real world.” Even if students are unfamiliar with the internet, using a walled garden approach precludes the possibility of authentic learning. If a teacher develops a project in a walled garden, that is where it stays. It cannot become part of the information ecology of the web, and students cannot thereby learn about community participation. Nor can they be convinced that their work has any greater significance than “something I had to do to get a grade.” They know very well that their work will never receive any attention from people who are not in their class.
And when we open the doors of the classroom to create connections within a larger learning eco-system, we encourage learning to happen anytime, anywhere and foster borderless interactions between micro-systems where additional adults can support and offer mentorship to students. This actually would help teachers to not feel that so much is on their shoulders.
And probably the most important characteristic of a participatory learning environment is to foster creativity. Research shows that encouraging creativity in a child’s learning process helps them to grow into “creative people and possess an ability to adopt a number of different stances or perspectives. (2006 Lindström, Lars). Creativity is central to a teacher’s mindset in a learning environment where skills of appropriation and distributed cognition are a part of integrated (project-based/connected) learning. Using a variety of media, tools and practices provides for opportunities to create new forms of learning and expression and make a commitment to support the development of participation skills for engaging with the world critically and creatively, making meaningful contributions to their culture, and developing a fully realized and empowered civic identity.
These are simply a few of the forms of participatory learning activities we've incorporated into our work at the RFK schools. Most of these activities are playful and creative and have the ability to be remixed and used in a variety of classroom settings. So we are developing the PLAYground as an open-content, open-knowledge system in the cloud to not only share these resources but also to encourage others who have participatory learning opportunities to share as well across networks.The new media literacies allow one to think in new ways about the processes of learning, because they acknowledge a shift from the top-down model to one that invokes all voices and all means of thinking and creating to build new knowledge. For many educators, however, this raises issues of maintaining control, building trust, and providing an open-source culture of learning that allows students to share their own expertise in and out of the classroom. These demands can seem contradictory and impossible to meet. At the same time, the mindsets and skill sets of the new media literacies are changing the nature of literacy itself. In effect, we are teaching an outdated version of literacy if we do not address the sorts of practices that new media and new technologies support.
Considering what social history tells us about the values of play, its links to innovation and creativity, then it is obvious that play should be the guiding principle in the educational process.This is our vision for PLAY, a next generation school model that can take advantage of technology, accelerate academic performance, and increase college readiness.Thank you!

PLAYing outside the box - Teens — Presentation Transcript

PLAYing Outside the Box Erin B. Reilly Creative Research Director Annenberg Innovation Lab
“Play is the work of childhood” -- Jean Piaget
http://playnml.wikispaces.com/
Motivation and EngagementLEGO – DISTRIBUTE THE EXPERTISE
Co-configured Expertise FULL SPEED
Relevance
Relevance
Learning Ecosystem
Creativity
Discover. Learn. Teach.